


Freak

by Canon_Is_Relative



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Asexual Character, Asexual Sam Winchester, Asexuality, Blood Drinking, Codependency, Codependent Winchesters, Cover Art, Demon Blood Addict Sam Winchester, Demon Blood Addiction, Dubious Consent, Episode: s04e13 After School Special, F/M, Fanmix available, First Kiss, First Time, Grief/Mourning, Heterosexual Sex, Internalized Acephobia, Internalized Homophobia, M/M, Masturbation, Season/Series 04, Self-Discovery, Sibling Love, Stanford Era, Teenagers, Young Love, Young Sam Winchester, complicated sibling feelings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-18
Updated: 2016-05-18
Packaged: 2018-06-09 04:08:28
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,421
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6889327
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Canon_Is_Relative/pseuds/Canon_Is_Relative
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>'Ever since I could remember, everything inside of me just wanted to fit in.<br/>I was never one for pretenders, everything I tried to be just wouldn't settle in.'</p>
<p>Sam Winchester is sixteen years old, and he knows he's a freak.<br/>Sam Winchester is twenty years old, and he's sure the whole world knows it too.<br/>Sam Winchester is twenty-five years old. He's loved and lost and lost again, and he won't apologize anymore.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Freak

**Author's Note:**

> Definitely check out andrea_deer's [fanmix/cover art masterpost here](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7PzfissdlrMmjFXaDdapeQO4KFUWw4da), and I highly recommend [listening to the fantastic playlist](http://www.filedropper.com/freak-asmb-fanmix) while you're reading ♥ ♥ ♥
> 
> Themes and occasional phrases throughout have been borrowed from the songs on the playlist. Summary quote is from 'Monster' by Imagine Dragons. I own nothing and am only grateful for the inspirational works of others.
> 
> Written for 2016 Ace SPN Mini Bang. It was so cool to work with andrea_deer on this project! The songs she found really shaped and influenced this story in a beautiful way, and I’m grateful to have made such a lovely friend thanks to this challenge ♥
> 
> Shout out to my best girl stardust_made for her generous help and advice over multiple read-throughs!
> 
> Explanations (minor spoilers) of tags/warnings are in the end notes.

 

x

 

Sam has demon blood in him, and that makes him a freak.

 

In the eyes of the world he is a freak, he knows that. Not like being a freak is exactly a new thing for him.

 

What is new, though? For the first time in his life, he doesn’t care.

 

For the first time in his life, he thinks -- looking up the long, taut length of quivering skin, kissing his way along the flat belly and heaving chest, sinking into the sweet, tight warmth of the body bucking beneath him -- for the first time in his life, he feels _normal._

"Sam," a rasp, a whimper, a groan. " _Sammy._ " 

 

Sam moans, leveraging them both up and onto hands and knees, and begins driving in, again and again. 

 

"Sam, come on. Come on, Sam, _fuck_ me, come on, oh fuck, fuck, Sammy..."

 

Sam loses it then, arousal complete, all-consuming, overpowering. He feels himself go supernova and then collapse. Feels strong fingers in his hair, pulling through tangles, scratching at his scalp. After a minute Sam heaves himself up onto his elbows, sweat cooling across his shoulders, a reckless grin on his face.

 

"Ready to go again?" Comes the teasing challenge.

 

Sam laughs and rolls to his back. Slender legs straddle his and long midnight-dark hair falls to curtain them both against the rising sun. He grins up into her face. "Think you can keep up with me, Ruby?"

 

She rocks her hips down against his and tosses her head, her eyes flashing in the early light. "Didn't know we were racing, tiger." She snakes a hand down between their bodies. "Let's go."

 

 

xx

 

 

When Sam wakes these days it is never a gentle slide into consciousness, there is no kind cushion of forgetfulness to break his fall.

 

He gasps awake on the crest of a wave that breaks on the shore and rushes back out to sea leaving him high and…well, not quite _dry_ , but he feels like cracked driftwood on a rocky beach and he could cry with relief when he finds his bed is empty.

 

Ruby is gone. She hasn’t stayed the night since that time Sam fucked her for hours before breaking down, crying and begging her to stay with him, so drunk it should not have been humanly possible for him to get it up. But by then there was so much of _her_ in him that there seemed to be nothing he was not humanly or inhumanly capable of. She’d held him all night, his face pressed against her ribs and her hands in his hair, holding him as he was finally crushed beneath that fatal weight, bowing to the fact that he had failed his brother. And then, as dawn broke, those same impossibly strong hands had built him back up, put him back together with the promise of revenge.

 

Sam’s glad that Ruby doesn’t stay anymore, that she slips out while he sleeps, sometimes leaving a vial for him on the nightstand. As much as he needs her, he needs to be alone when he wakes. It’s too much, to open his eyes to the sight of a beautiful face on the pillow beside him, the warm sweetness of tender fingers against his bare skin, the sleepy comfort of being seen and known and…well. He won’t say _loved_ , he’s not completely delusional. Ruby cares about him, true, but it would be a betrayal to those precious few people who _had_ loved him to let himself get lost enough even to pretend that this was the same.

 

Sam needs to be alone when the reckless uncaring of the night before ebbs away, leaving him too starkly aware of how far he has fallen, of how much of a freak he really is.

 

He remembers the taste of that word in his mouth, how he used to hurl it like a grenade at Dean.

 

_I don't want to be the freak for once, Dean! I want to be normal!_

 

He doesn't know how old he is in the crystal-clear memory he carries around with him, sitting on some bleachers somewhere and pleading with Dean to understand him. 

 

Well -- he must have been fourteen. It’s autumn in the memory and Dean’s wearing Dad’s old leather jacket so it must have been just before Dean dropped out of school. Sam’s freshman year. He placates his rampaging mind with dates and facts, stalling to keep the memory from playing out any further.

 

Stalling to delay the moment when he connects himself as he is now with the longing that fourteen-year-old-Sammy felt, the way his desire for _normal_ was heightened and stretched in those days into something mighty and desperate.

 

_I don’t want to be a freak._

How many nights had Sam thrashed in his bed, trapped inside a nightmare that was more memory than dream. How many times, but Dean was always there to grumble and shake him awake. Dean, whose existence now surely made mockery of Sam calling his own childhood fears _nightmares_. Dean who would never escape the nightmare existence he’d signed up for because Sam had kept Dean so tied up to him all their lives that Dean couldn’t break free even when faced with what should have been their final goodbye. Sam hadn’t asked for this, would never have asked this of Dean. But not stopping it, not saving Dean from himself…

 

There is simply not enough forgiveness in the world for having failed his brother so deeply.

 

When he wakes like this, naked and slathered in sin, it’s too much to take. All his life he’s been the freak who didn’t want this, any of it -- not the naked beautiful girl, not the life of the groundless hunter driven only by revenge, none of it -- and now Dean is rotting in Hell while Sam is fucking a demon.

 

Sam fumbles for the light then, knocking things helter-skelter from the bedside table, searching for what Ruby had promised him. Panic rises like bile when his hands sweep across chipped laminate and nothing else, but then he sees it, just out of reach on the dirty carpet. A small crystal vial, heart-shaped, some chintzy souvenir thing, sloshing with thick, almost-black liquid.

 

Time stretches out, syrupy-slow, and Sam pulls sweet comfort just from knowing it’s there, if he should need it. Which he doesn’t, yet.

 

He’s going to start tracking those demons he got a tip on today, they sound like real high-level SOBs, he’s going to hunt them down and once they’ve told him what they know he’s going to fucking slaughter them, pull their greasy black souls right out of their meatsuits and send the humans back home to their families. Saving people, hunting things; it’s the only way he can be close to Dean anymore. He can’t touch his brother, can’t apologize for everything that went wrong, every way Sam went wrong, but he can do this. He can carry on with the work his brother would have wanted for them.

 

He is Dean’s brother, and nothing can take that from him. His eyes blur. A red tide is rising around him. It’s okay, he tells himself, his voice a piping tremor that starts tidal waves, shrill like he’s a child again with the depths of his convictions as yet unplumbed. It’s okay. Dean will save me. He can’t breathe for the blood that pours into his mouth, his lungs. But it’s okay. Dean will breathe for me.

 

 

xxx

 

 

When he was fourteen, Sam fell in love with his third English teacher of the year.

 

After school one afternoon, shortly after figuring out just how royally screwed he was, Sam sat on the bleachers and let Dean’s pissed-off rant roll off his back like he wished he could let the fear roll off; like he’d let the pain of that bully Dirk’s punch fade, quick as a bruise. Instead he kept feeling cold waves crash over his head whenever he thought about it. He had a crush on a teacher; he had a crush on a _man._

 

“I don’t want to be the freak for once, Dean! I want to be normal!”

 

“So taking a beating, that’s normal?”

 

No. It wasn’t. But neither was knowing how to keep your mouth shut and walk it off after the blows fell. Neither was the way he’d spaced out during math earlier, thinking about Mr. Wyatt. About the way he’d looked when he pulled Sam aside after class to talk quietly to him, calling him _Mr. Winchester_ and listening to him with that smile that made Sam feel for a few minutes like he was the only other person in the world. That soft smile that made Sam think that Mr. Wyatt had to be the most beautiful person Sam had ever encountered.

 

He knew that was wrong, though. He'd known that forever, known it since the night of Dean's first-ever date, when his brother came out of the bathroom smelling clean but not just like soap, and not like the crap Dad put on his face after shaving, either, and with his hair sticking up in a new way, tugging on the hem of a brand new shirt. New, new, new, and Sam had exclaimed that Dean looked  _beautiful_.

 

"Dude!" Dean had gaped at him, "No I don't! I'm a dude." And dudes aren't beautiful to other dudes, he'd explained, tying little Sammy's head and heart into confusing knots. “’Beautiful' is for chicks.”

 

"For  _women_ ," Sam had corrected him, echoing their Dad's admonishment from earlier in the week, snotty on purpose to try and hide how flustered -- and, for some reason that scared him, pissed-off and sick to his stomach -- he was.

 

Dean had rolled his eyes, then pulled Sam close with his arm around his neck in a gentle headlock, mussing up his hair.

 

Dean had gone on his date and come home later than he was supposed to, grinning and pink-cheeked and definitely-not-beautiful. Sam made sure to tell him how stupid he looked, that night and every night after when the dates didn’t stop, until eventually Dean started pestering Sam about the girls in his classes, trying to introduce him to the younger sisters of the girls he went out with.

 

That night after Sam’s first run-in with Dirk the Jerk, Sam stood in the bathroom mirror scrutinizing the bruise on his cheek, trying to figure out if it looked bad enough that he shouldn’t go over to study at Barry’s. He didn’t want to make Barry feel bad or like he…owed Sam something?

 

But the truth was that Sam had felt a hot thrill, like the adrenaline rush before a hunt, when he stood up to Dirk. But not because of the fight. Because it felt good to be standing up for Barry. It felt magnificent to be standing strong and protecting his friend. How often did he get to be the one putting his body between danger and someone he cared about? Smoothing down his hair and thinking he didn’t care about the bruise because he really just wanted to go over and see his friend, he didn’t hear Dean’s footsteps until it was too late and Dean was pushing into the bathroom, taking in the sight of Sam staring at himself in the mirror and cracking a grin.

 

“Meeting up with a girl, Sam-I-am?” came Dean’s entirely predictable jibe.

 

“ _No!_ ” Sam ducked his head and shoved past Dean without looking at him. His face felt hot like he’d been caught out at something, but he didn’t know what.

 

Later that night, walking home, he thought about the way he’d heard guys at his various schools talk, and about how Dean always said the first girl he ever kissed tasted like strawberry lip gloss and bubblegum. Barry hadn’t even tasted like chapstick. Or maybe Sam hadn’t gotten his tongue involved the way he was supposed to. Were you supposed to use your tongue on a first kiss? His backpack felt like it weighed a million pounds and he shifted the straps on his shoulders, the memory of fumbling touches and dry lips playing over his skin. Whose idea had the kissing been?

 

Dean was pretending he wasn’t watching porn when Sam got back to the motel so Sam dumped his backpack and ducked into the bathroom again. His reflection in the cracked glass hadn’t changed, so Sam tried out the thought, _I kissed a boy,_ moving his lips silently along with the words, and felt again that same wave of cold uncertainty from before. So he tried, _I kissed someone!_ and ended up grinning at himself and forgetting to turn on the fan before he started his shower.

 

Dean bitched at him afterwards about the fog that rolled out of the bathroom and Sam went to bed thinking how weird life was. He’d started the week with a crush on his teacher, finished it with kissing his only friend, and there Dean was to make him eat his vegetables and turn on the bathroom fan and wake him from the inevitable nightmare that came when Dad didn’t check in when he was supposed to, again.

 

He kissed Barry three more times before Dad dropped back into his life to take him away from Truman High. The novelty and illicitness of it, new and unlike anything Sam had ever had or thought he wanted before, was thrilling. It wasn’t anything like he’d thought it would be, from the things Dean said.

 

He didn’t try thinking about the kissing while masturbating until Truman was three weeks behind them, and it didn’t get him very far. Thinking about Barry that way felt like a total invasion of privacy, both his and Barry’s, and after a couple of attempts to get past it he gave up. Gave up the fantasizing that was, not the masturbating, he was pretty much a pro at that already. It was hard to give up on the _idea_ of fantasizing, though; from what Sam had gathered it seemed to figure importantly in a person’s sex life, solo or otherwise. Before, when he didn’t have any experiences of his own to draw from, and since porn and skin mags were disgusting, he’d just figured he didn’t have what Dean called “spank bank material” and didn’t worry about it. Now, though…

 

Once, when he knew Dean was going to be out for hours and he could take his time, he tried to fantasize about Mr. Wyatt. And he ended up feeling so shy, so embarrassed by the thought of Mr. Wyatt somehow finding out, somehow knowing how much he meant to Sam that Sam would even _try_ to think about him like that…

 

That night, Sam ended up doing what he hadn’t done in a couple years, since he’d gone on campaign to make Dean realize he wasn’t a baby anymore. After making microwave popcorn and turning on the Discovery channel he’d crawled into Dean’s bed and curled up as small as he could with his arms around Dean’s pillow. He wondered if Dean would still remember what to do when he got home, if he would remember how he was supposed to pretend to be mad at Sam and then make a game of collecting all the dropped popcorn kernels, telling Sam he couldn’t sleep until they’d found them all, until Sam drifted off, safe and comfortable in Dean’s bed.

 

Maybe, Sam told himself finally, blurry eyes fixed on the door, determined not to fall asleep until Dean came home and said it was okay, maybe I didn’t have a crush on Mr. Wyatt after all, maybe I just wanted him to be my…to take care of me. To care about me.

 

And despite the way he dreamed about kissing Mr. Wyatt that night and woke up with his open mouth pressed against Dean’s shoulder, Sam clung to that idea for a long time.

 

 

xxxx

 

 

Dean had rolled his eyes, then pulled Sam close with his arm around his neck in a gentle headlock, mussing up his hair.

 

Sam remembers how he'd squealed, remembers how he’d struggled without really trying to get away, and thinks now that it might have been the last time he let Dean do that. 

 

They'd been so close. Sam lets the scenes wrack his body one after another, his heart a pathetic wounded thing, bleeding out, too scared to stop running. In Sam’s memories, it seems like Dean is always touching him. His brother's hands are such an integral part of his childhood tapestry he'd never given it a thought until those hands were broken and bloody and eternally cold.

 

Sam will never, ever be forgiven for failing his brother. He curls his fingers into the bruises Ruby had left on his body, needing the sense memory of something other than his desperate, futile attempt to realign his brother’s bones so that the thing he put into that hole in the ground in Pontiac, Illinois, would resemble something that used to be his brother.

 

A voice in his head screams at him, _How can you rest easy when your brother is in Hell because of you?_ On a sob he answers that he doesn’t want to be forgiven, he only wants to sleep.

 

The bathroom door opens, momentarily flooding the room with light before the switch clicks off. “Oh, baby,” Ruby sighs, and the bed beside him dips. Sam stays curled in on himself as Ruby molds herself around him. He’d thought he was alone. He _needs_ to be alone. But Ruby’s here, her presence behind him somehow larger than life as she envelops him with warmth and strength and gruff words of comfort.

 

He knows he needs her, needs _it,_ but every time they do this, when helping him beef up for the fight brings her here, into his bed, every time there always comes a point when the balance shifts and the scales tip the wrong way. He knows he needs her but he doesn’t need _this_ , he’s never needed this. He knows he’s a freak, though, knows he’s screwed up, so maybe it isn’t his fault. Maybe that was what had been wrong with him the whole time: he’d had demon blood in him since he was a baby, tainting everything he touched and tasted, leaving him cold to normal human desires and making him hunger for things no human should want.

 

But that’s such bullshit, he thinks, as Ruby begins to rub circles low on his belly, murmuring in his ear, holding him as he starts in on the shakes. How can he be doing this at all, he has free will, doesn’t he? Yellow Eyes is dead, Sam is free of whatever bullshit destiny he’d been signed up for, so why is he still here, why is he doing this? Wanting it, enjoying it, taking pleasure in something so monumentally screwed up while Dean is in Hell.

 

Ruby is so strong inside her slight body that when he tries to push her away she barely moves, keeps kissing him while reaching under Sam’s pillow for his knife. Mouthing at his neck as she pricks her finger, nipping at his ear as she paints his lips with her blood. Sam closes his eyes, breathing through his nose as she undulates against him, catching his hand and guiding it down her stomach and between her legs. He darts his tongue out and catches the taste of her blood on the corner of his mouth and with a groan he rolls on top of her, burying himself in her, losing himself in the smell and taste and strength of her.

 

When he comes with Ruby’s fingers wrapped in the cord he wears around his neck he has a moment of hysterical clarity, thinking how proud Dean would be if he could see this. How proud Dean would be that Sam has finally learned how to do this, how to forget his troubles for an hour and lose himself in pleasure like this, the way Dean always called him a freak for claiming not to care about.

 

Sweat dripping from his temples onto Ruby’s heaving breasts, Sam thinks that if this is what it takes to be normal, to fall for a demon in order to feel what _normal_ humans feel, maybe he doesn’t need to apologize for it after all.

 

Later that morning, at the diner, Ruby says to him, “This is different for you, isn’t it?” while gesturing to the space between the two of them.

 

Sam looks up, scrutinizing her with eyes that feel clearer than they have in months. He shuts his laptop, pulls out his wallet and holds a card out to the waitress, then folds his arms and leans back in the booth.

 

“Well. I’m sitting here doing all the research while someone else maxes out my credit card on cheeseburgers-for-breakfast and booze-for-dinner, so…not so different for me, no.”

 

Ruby snorts indelicately and leans forward, her tank top gaping under her leather jacket. She’s not wearing a bra. “I mean the sex, genius. It’s kind of obvious. You haven’t felt like this with anyone else before, have you?”

 

Sam doesn’t react when he feels her bare toes skimming against his thigh under the table. She has so much of his weakness already that he’s not about to give her more than he has to, so he admits only to this, the minimum of truth that he can spare: “It’s the blood. It’s your blood. Whatever else your blood is doing for me, my powers or whatever, it makes me want you, too. That’s all this is.”

 

She cocks an eyebrow at him. “You think?”

 

She’s playing him, he’s sure. Pretty sure. How could she not feel it? He nods, and adds, “Well it’s sure not that body you’re wearing. No offense, but she’s not my type.”

 

Ruby smirks, running a hand down her front, thumb catching against a peaked nipple. “Oh, baby, I can change if the meat’s not doing it for you.”

 

Sam ignores the roil of nausea in his belly, rolls his eyes and signs for the check.

 

He doesn’t see her for a week after that. The tip he thought would lead to Lilith turns out to be a waste of time. He traps another demon though and pulls it no problem, the headache afterwards eased by a swallow from Ruby’s flask. He feels the low-grade desire burning low in his belly after that but it isn’t anything he can’t deal with on his own. He’d tried dealing with it with someone else, shortly after they started, which was why he’d been so sure of himself back in the diner when he told her it was the blood and nothing else. Never mind the way he got around her sometimes, like he couldn’t think, couldn’t breathe, until he was breathing her; he was just as indifferent to physical pleasure with other people as he’d ever been.

 

So, this is great, Sam thinks, a week later when the flask is dry and he’s starting to get the jitters, craving the power and calm that come over him when he’s about to take out a real nasty son of a bitch, the kind he still needs her to help him deal with. It’s great, really, the way Ruby has him essentially trapped. The only one in the world who can help him, the only one who has answers, the only one who will deal with him.

 

Sam wakes that night from a dream that leaves him panting, gasping in the phantom smell of leather and gun oil and sulfur and smoke. The stink of burning hair that is his last memory of Jessica. He wonders sometimes what he would have felt, if he’d been given the chance to process the fact that he had avenged her. If he hadn’t found out ten minutes after his brother killed Yellow Eyes that his brother had also sacrificed the whole of himself to bring Sam back to life. He wonders how he’ll feel when he has Lilith bleeding out under his hands.

 

 

xxxxx

 

 

When Sam was twenty years old he fell in love with the girl his best friend had been talking about for weeks.

 

He’d gone though his life until then without leaving much of a wake, rarely staying in one place long enough to have people asking questions of him, only needing to fit himself against Dean and Dad to know who he was. Going away to college was, to put it mildly, a disaster. For awhile, anyway. He simply did not know how to be stationary. But he learned. He did not know how to live with seeing the same people, day in and day out and no end in sight, but he adapted. Eventually. There was a solid year of unadulterated misery and then there was a year of questioning everything because this couldn’t be all there was to life, right? And then there was Jess.

 

The first time Jess kissed him his only thought was something about hoping Dean never saw her because put her in a ‘70s housewife dress and you could photoshop her no problem into any of the handful of Winchester family photos that had survived the fire.

 

The second time, he kissed her, and he forgot to think about anything but how fucking scared he was that she would actually like him because he did not know how to do this.

 

In the years between his first kiss with his high school friend and his first kiss with this incredible woman who would become his partner in all things, Sam had come to accept, more or less, the fact that he just wasn’t all that into sex, as weird as that was for a young, healthy guy with all other systems firing normally.

 

From time to time he’d put some effort to digging in to the root of his disinterest -- his freshman year after a disastrous hookup attempt he discovered a website but it was only a few years old with no more than a couple hundred members and Sam thought it was kind of shady; no one actually _didn’t want_ sex, right? The instinct to procreate was hardwired into the human condition and these “aven” people mostly seemed like they needed some therapy -- and he concluded it had something to do with the way he was raised: Dad and Dean and their nomadic lifestyle, the way he rarely stopped somewhere long enough to develop real feelings for anyone so instead he’d learned to romanticize the acts of love, how he’d lose himself in imagining having someone in his life to surprise with flowers and gifts and share holidays with, but rarely fantasizing further than that.

 

He remembered trying to fantasize as a teenager, how turned off he’d been by including the idea of another person into any act of physical pleasure. His few forays into that mysterious realm in the real world had been exciting just by the fact of him being bold enough to finally try it, and after figuring out he wasn’t really gay by the lack of excitement he’d felt trying to go there, he’d decided to ditch all the stress that had come along with that horrible month of thinking he was a sexual deviant -- not that he really thought that about gay people anymore, he knew now that all his issues about being maybe-gay himself had come from some secondhand phobia he’d picked up probably from his dad and the hick towns they tended to stay in -- and just accept the fact that he was straight but not very good at it.

 

By his senior year of high school, with prom and application deadlines coming up, Sam had a plan in place. College and a real future: no more pain and fear and whiskey-and-dental-floss first aid. He’d finished the common app but his choice colleges all had special admissions essay questions that he needed to spend more time on. The advisor at Lincoln High was swamped with students asking for her help but she said she’d squeeze Sam in during study hall next week. Sam got home that same afternoon to find Dad and Dean packing up and telling him to be ready to leave in the morning.

 

So Sam ran away, for the second time in his life. He didn’t go far, but he managed to stay out almost all night. Because he had a friend he hadn’t told even Dean about, so they had no reason to look for him in that part of town. She’d invited him over on the weekends to use her computer to work on his college applications, and she’d asked him to the prom, and he’d said yes, and her parents were away at the symphony until midnight, and she had condoms hidden under the tampons in her bathroom drawer.

 

She went down on him like she enjoyed doing it, Sam’s body shocking between terror and ecstasy, and when he was finally hard she slid up his body and sank down onto him, around him, moving over him like she’d been given some step-by-step instructions on how one body was supposed to work with another body. With his hands on her hips, barely able to breathe, Sam thought about all the things he’d missed over the years, caught up a day late and a dollar short and all in the name of the family business.

 

_College_ , he thought, echoing her increasingly frantic moans and cries, not daring to move much because it seemed like if he did he’d buck her off -- the logistics of this thing made no sense to him, just another memo he’d missed – _College, I’m going to college._ He was going to go somewhere far away, so far that Dad couldn’t follow him, somewhere that Dean…She clenched around him, gasping and tossing her head and making strange, awkward squealing noises like an injured kitten. But the way she rolled her hips in shocky little bursts made Sam’s eyes fly wide open and all thought stuttered to a halt as his body shuddered through its orgasm.

 

Dean found him after because he was walking along the main road at two AM, in plain view of God and the streetlights. Dean opened the passenger door of the Impala and Sam got in, wordless. Dean, for once in his life, offered no comment, and kept Dad off Sam’s back until they hit the road at daybreak.

 

Then there was the first time Jessica plucked at the hem of his shirt, grinning shyly, asking, _Is this okay?_ as she skimmed her long fingers up over his ribs, and Sam couldn’t help the shiver that ran through him. No one had touched him so intimately in so long. And he loved her. He was sure of it, now. Sure, at least, that he _could_ love her.

 

They were in the park, they’d been doing homework at a picnic table and hadn’t left even when the sun began to sink in the sky. The fiery clouds were too beautiful to imagine going back indoors, and that was even before a perfect crescent moon emerged from the layers of sunset gold to captivate them. Jess was gazing up at it, a look of quiet awe on her face, so Sam came around to sit beside her and rest his head against hers. “You want the moon, Jessica? Just say the word and I’ll throw a lasso around it and pull it down for you.” She turned her face to his and kissed him so sweetly that Sam thought he might actually taste sugar on his lips when they finally parted. But he only tasted Jess, her skin still warm from the heat of the day. “Is this okay?” she asked with her hands under his shirt, and he nodded mutely as she turned to him, rising to her knees on the bench to settle in his lap, kissing him with one hand over his heart.

 

He remembered the girl then, that girl from senior year. He remembered her and realized with a jolt how different this felt. With that girl, then, he’d felt his body turn into that of a stranger’s, turning every breath that left him into a lie. With Jessica, now, he felt only the soaring sensation that came from telling his body’s own truth. The soft sounds Jess was making, the breathy exhalations and unconscious exclamations of love and pleasure, were beautiful to his ears.

 

She loved him. She wanted him. He was making her feel good. And he, so often useless and unmoored, had finally come to ground and found that the shoreline did not limit the restless and unruly ocean but rather defined it. Waves seemed to break over and around them, but not at the frantic, destructive pace that had been essential to Sam’s trysts before -- fake it ’til you make it, ‘cuz treating a fuck like a fight had kept his body interested, gave him a way to stay engaged until the sexual stimulus took over.

 

Here, though, now, with Jess, in this moonlit moment, she seemed like she’d be content to kiss him until the stars faded from the sky and he felt none of that. None of the instinct to protect himself by going too fast and too hard and leaving too soon. Here he felt only the soul-deep joy of making her feel good, feel loved, and if part of that meant using his body to give her body the pleasure it craved, then he could do that.

 

It wasn’t until they started talking about getting an apartment together that Sam let his old fears back in, let himself face the reality that was his screwed up mind-body situation. Because even now, when there wasn’t the slightest doubt in his mind that he was in love with her, he still didn’t feel the corresponding desire for her that he should have. And then Jess said something one night, while they were talking through the idea of living together. She said that if they were going to live together, they had to be _it_ for each other. They had to be able to talk about anything, could he be okay with the idea of talking about anything, trying to keep an open mind even about difficult subjects?

 

Talking about anything. He and Dean used to talk about everything, until Sam started to grow up and realize that there was a world outside of the two -- three -- of them. Until Sam figured out that he was some kind of…torch, some baton that his father and brother were carrying towards some eternal finish line. Until Sam understood that the way he felt for Dean was not a two-way street; to Dean, they were family, and you couldn’t choose family. Sam had known, at twelve years old, that if he could choose a brother all over again he would choose Dean. But he also knew, because he’d asked, that Dean didn’t believe in that kind of choice.

 

_That doesn’t even make sense, Sammy, no wonder you’re missing every shot you’re too busy thinking crazy thoughts. Come on, reload and try again._

 

When Dean stopped answering his questions, when Sam finally worked out that he should have a choice about his life but didn’t, Sam started feeling sometimes like his brother took up all the air in the room just by breathing. He longed to be able to talk to Dean about this, about any- and everything in his life, but after years of silence he wasn’t even sure if he’d know how to talk to Dean anymore. Or if Dean would want to talk to him.

 

But here was someone who did, who wanted him to talk, and who listened when he did. And because Sam couldn’t be honest with Jess about much of his life before Stanford, he resolved to be honest with her about everything else he possibly could and so he mustered his courage and broached the topic of sex. Confessed his failings like deadly sin: he loved her more than he could put into words but it wasn’t enough, his love hadn’t turned into a desire to constantly jump her. Or, well, to ever jump her.

 

After laughing at his choice of words and kissing him swiftly on the lips she told him, with an offhandedness that took him aback because he was so used to treating each of his problems as world-ending, that she knew. She told him that she didn’t mind at all, she knew how much she meant to him and what did it matter that he just had a low sex drive? She laughed again when he couldn’t form a response, just gaped at her while his face turned red. “You don’t have to act like the stereotype of a TV Male to be healthy and okay, Sam. That whole ‘boys will be boys’ thing is a stupid, destructive myth that our society needs to get over already.”

 

So, that was that. That was that until his brother came to get him, until his girlfriend was killed the same way as his mom, until he found out that he had demon blood in him almost since birth and until his brother killed the son of a bitch who’d bled in Sam’s mouth and killed everyone Sam had ever loved including, by proxy, the brother who couldn’t let him go.

 

So, that was that.

 

Sam was a freak, a demon magnet and a death omen and if he took his pleasure with a demon now, well, at least he wasn’t putting anyone innocent in the line of fire.

 

 

xxxxxx

 

 

Sam is twenty-five years old. He’s loved and lost and lost again and then, unfathomably, he’s been given back what he never deserved to lose. His brother, he who was dead, is now living, so why does Sam keep on looking for the living among the dead? Because Sam, he’s been loved, been lost, been used and left behind and he’s not sure what to trust in anymore, doesn’t know if he can bring himself to trust in miracles.

 

Not so long ago, maybe five hundred miles back, Dean had told him that if Sam weren’t his brother, he’d be hunting him down like the monsters Dad taught them to kill. “If I didn’t know you…” Dean had said.

 

_But you do know me,_ Sam hadn’t said, shouldn’t have had to say.

 

So many things, too many, had gone unsaid while Dean loosed his anger on Sam, while Sam stood there and let him, while Sam felt his foundations shift to hear that Heaven wanted him to stop what he was doing, and in the end he could only voice the truth that had been his sole companion for so long.

 

“You were gone. I was here. I had to keep on fighting without you.”

 

_I’m doing it for you,_ Sam shouldn’t have had to say.

 

Because Sam does stand behind what he’s doing. Even after the revelation that the angels -- or at least, the one angel, his brother’s guardian or whatever who Sam still hasn’t met -- are taking Dean’s side on this, he still can’t shake his conviction that what he’s doing is righteous, that taking this taint in his blood and using it to help innocent people, using it to exact justice against Lilith for what she did to Dean, is the right thing to do.

 

But Dean is right, too: Sam did hide it from him. Why?

 

It started with Ruby, that miracle night when Dean came back to him. It had started with Ruby pretending not to know Dean and Bobby. It’s been bugging him for weeks and now he’s starting to let himself wonder if Ruby knew that Dean had busted out. Had been busted out. If that’s why she’d shown up when she did. After a week of radio silence there she was with a fresh flask and a sweet smile, telling him to take a hit and take a shower and she’d order a pizza. And before she left she asked Sam if he and his brother were “…together.”

 

She’s not the first demon to ask him that -- filthy implication had been thick on the ground in those months when Dean was gone, every demon he tried to deal with seemed to have something to say -- and she's certainly not the first person to ask or imply or simply assume that he and Dean were something other than brothers. But she is the first one who said it while knowing damn well that it wasn’t the case. Sam’s been called -- and called himself -- plenty of ugly things over the years and the jab from Ruby that night had barely registered with him beyond Dean’s classic _Come on, really?_ look that had resonated recognition through Sam’s aching chest and kickstarted his belief that this might just, in fact, be real.

 

What Ruby said hadn’t bothered him, then. A few years ago it might have, but he knows now, with a certainty that makes freaking out about it feel like a waste of time, that the way he and Dean are with each other isn’t normal. It’s the kind of thing that bothers Dean when other people talk about it, though Sam’s never sure if it’s more about them being brothers or about the implication that Dean would look at another guy that way.

 

Sam’s pretty sure he wouldn’t be bothered if he did turn out to be gay, just on principle. If he’s being honest, though, he’s glad that he doesn’t seem to be anything. He’s glad when it means that he can love Dean as fiercely as he does without worrying that it means something else _._ He’s never felt anything in his life like what he feels for his brother so he’s honestly grateful that he and Dean _are_ brothers, because this feeling can be what it is, plain, pure and complete, with no traitorous voice in the back of his head telling him he’s a freak for not wanting _more._ That he’s broken for not being able to give _more._

 

It feels as though he’s given Dean every last thing he has to give -- tried to give, anyway, though these days everything he sends Dean’s way gets marked _Return to Sender_ and flung back in his face.

 

So, no. What Ruby said, _Are you, like…together?_ hadn't bothered him, not then. But thinking about it now he clenches his teeth against the dull metallic taste that floods his mouth and he wonders if it was her payback for what he’d said in the diner the week before, that what they have between them is only skin deep, as superficial as a witch’s glamour to be thrown off with the right combination of words and willpower. That Sam only wants her because of her blood.

 

Her blood. He thinks about her blood, and a ripple of anticipation judders through him.

 

The demon blood makes him a freak, Sam knows that. Wanting Ruby the way he does makes him a freak according to the natural laws of his body that he’s been living with since he was a teenager. Not wanting her would make him a freak in the eyes of anyone who looked at her and saw only a beautiful woman. Even breathing the same air as her makes him a freak in the eyes of his brother.

 

Sam scrubs his hands over his face, barely stifling a grown.

 

“Dammit Sam would you quit flailing around and get some damn sleep?”

 

The sound of his brother’s voice from three feet away still catches Sam off guard at times. He goes stock still, and then forces himself to relax incrementally before he replies.

 

“Sorry.”

 

“And quit freakin’ apologizing, I don’t want to hear it.”

 

Dean only hates listening to Sam’s ‘sorry’s when he thinks Sam’s done something really wrong.

 

“What do you want to hear, then, Dean?”

 

“Right now? I’m thinking even you snoring would be a big improvement.”

 

There’s heavy silence in the room for a moment and then the grating squeal of cheap bedsprings as his brother turns onto his side, and Sam risks a look over at him. In the sickly light that sneaks in from the parking lot through blinds gone askew, he can see only the broad expanse of Dean’s back. Sam can’t see, but he knows that beneath his t-shirt Dean’s skin is smooth and unmarked, save for that assertive handprint raised on his shoulder.

 

Sam remembers one of the last times he saw his dad, remembers yelling at him, accusing him of being pissed off that he couldn’t control Sam any more. He wishes he could do the same right now, just go off on Dean and damn the consequences. Every time Sam deviates from the family path it’s high drama. School then Stanford, the visions and now the powers…

 

He’s better than Dean. Stronger. He’s doing things neither of them, or Dad, ever thought possible. But Dean doesn’t understand it, and can’t see past his own blind prejudice.

 

_If I didn’t know you…_

 

All you see is who I am in relation to you, Sam thinks. You can’t control me, Dean, and I scare you. If I told you everything, at best I would scare you worse and at worst, you would leave. After everything, you would leave me alone again.

 

Five hundred miles ago, Dean slumping around the motel room and shoving things into his duffel, Sam had stood by the door and asked Dean if was going to leave without him. Not even bothering to raise his voice, get in Sam’s face, throw a punch, Dean had just shaken his head. No, he wasn’t leaving. “But I gotta be honest, man, I don’t know why I’m still here, you obviously don’t need me --"

 

“Dean --"

 

“No, really, seems to me you’ve gone and got yourself a new big brother -- big sister, even better! She took care of you real good while I was in the pit, didn’t she, kept you safe, taught you everything she knew. Gee, Sammy, I just gotta wonder why you’re wasting your time with me.”

Somehow Sam had almost forgotten how Dean could be, how he was like an ocean tide when he got like that. Relentless, unstoppable, and inexorably dragging Sam under. And Sam had felt ten years old again, helpless and useless and eternally subsumed. Family-genus-species, Winchester-Dean-Sam, and Dean taking up all the air in the room because Sam didn’t know how to breathe for himself. And if Dean’s not there, well, nature abhors a vacuum, and Sam can’t breathe until he fills it in with something.

 

He should tell Dean about Ruby. The sex, the blood, whatever, everything, he should tell Dean. Dean will find out eventually, one way or another. But finding the words, when Dean’s back is to him like this, feels somewhat south of impossible.

 

In the years they ran together after Dean came and got him at school, Sam had sometimes had the feeling that they were unstoppable, the two of them. Inevitable like gravity, or the tide. Now, though, they’re out of tune. Sam loves Dean with a ferocity that should scare him. It certainly scares other people. He’d seen it in Bobby’s eyes. He’d heard it in the quavering bravado of the demons he’d summoned, trying to deal for Dean’s soul. He wished it scared Dean, because that might mean that Dean understood.

 

“Dean,” Sam says finally, after a truck backfires on the road outside and Dean’s complete lack of reaction tells Sam he hasn’t gone back to sleep, either. “Dean, we’ll figure all this out, okay? Everything’s going to be fine. I swear to you, it’s going to work out.”

 

Those are Dean’s words that Sam is borrowing. And Dean had said Sam replaced him with Ruby and Ruby had joked that he and Dean were ‘together’ and Sam has to admit -- was happy to admit, wished Dean would let him admit -- that despite everything he’d felt complete, often even content, when he was living his life with his brother by his side, two of them against the world, shoulder to shoulder, two clichés in a pod. Now he has all of Dean’s attention but none of his understanding, isn’t even sure of the love that had seemed so unconditional so recently.

 

When Sam was twenty-two, his big brother had muscled his way back into Sam’s life by throwing him down on the floor of his own apartment. When he was fourteen, Dean didn’t speak to him for a week after Dad dragged Sam back home with a stray dog’s hair all over his jeans and Arizona red dirt in the treads of his shoes. He has another memory, kind of dream-like, some time when he was a kid and Dean had been away. He remembers catching sight of Dean and then the joy like a geyser in his chest accompanied by a bright stab of pain, the toy airplane he’d been playing with jabbing sharp into his stomach, and Dean laughing and swiping at his own eyes before pulling down his sleeve to wipe Sam’s face.

 

_Yes_ , he would have answered Ruby, then. _Yes_ , we are ‘together.’ Just because I don’t mean it the way you do doesn’t mean I don’t mean it. But now? Sam listens to the silence. Dean’s ready to write him off. Of all the million ways Sam had imagined getting Dean back from Hell, finding him ready to send Sam that way himself wasn’t one of them.

 

All his life Sam has felt like a freak. But Dean, for all his teasing, has never before truly treated him like one. Whether he was sixteen and turning down dates or twenty-three and begging Dean to watch out for him turning dark side, for Dean he was always just Sam. Someone to protect, watch out for. Someone to shape into different poses like a damn doll, no matter if Sam didn’t want to bend that way. I don’t need fixing, Sam wants to tell Dean. And I don’t need your forgiveness for being who and what I am.

 

“Go to sleep, Sam.” Dean has finally rolled back on to his stomach to face Sam across the gap between them.

 

“Yeah.” Sam folds his arms over his chest, and closes his eyes.

 

x

 

**Author's Note:**

> Explanations of warnings/tags:
> 
> Warning for dubious consent is for asexual!Sam having sex with Ruby while under the influence of demon blood...basically supernatural roofies.
> 
> Explicit heterosexual context is Sam/Ruby, also 18-year-old!Sam/OFC 
> 
> Internalized homo/ace-phobia is Sam as he's trying to work out who and what the hell he is.
> 
> And with apologies to "[those aven people](http://www.asexuality.org/home/)" :)
> 
> Thank you so much for reading, I would love to hear from you, and comments for the artist can be directed [here](http://backroom-4-art.livejournal.com/21140.html).


End file.
